Carnival

They were out of sight, and Lesa considering her options for the least painful method of breathing, when she felt the first savage, stinging bite on the edge of her foot and jerked stupidly against the thorns, and cried.

Stefan had broken open a nant’s nest. And while they might not think humans were good eating, they were more enthusiastic about driving off something that might be the predator that had attacked their home.

Except this predator didn’t have anyplace to run.

22

KUSANAGI-JONES WAS STILL AT IT LONG AFTER SUNRISE, but he thought the staple might be loosening. He heard a faint clicking now when he rocked it against the wood. When it went, it would go all at once, and he’d find himself sprawled flat on his back in the dirt. At least the chains and the staple were steel, unlike the manacles. They’d make a reasonably effective weapon, once the other end was no longer bolted down.

The clatter of the door lock left him plenty of warning that somebody was about to enter, if the murmur of voices hadn’t been enough. He released his grip on the chains and began pacing, wearing out the brief arc permitted. Two steps and pivot, two steps and pivot the other way. Exactly what Vincent would have been doing in his position.

He had less than a meter of slack.

Light spilled in when the door opened with the brilliance of midmorning. Kusanagi-Jones averted his eyes, staring toward the darkest corner of his domain, and waited until the door banged the frame again and the brightness dimmed.

“Michelangelo.” Robert again, standing by the door, his left hand cupped beside his thigh as if he held something concealed in the palm.

“Breakfast already?” Kusanagi-Jones asked. “Seems like you just left.”

Robert’s smile was tight. “Do you remember what I said about the Right Hand not being the barbarians we’re painted?”

Kusanagi-Jones folded his hands in front of him and nodded slowly, the chains pulling against his wrists.

“I was wrong,” Robert said, and flipped something through the air.

Kusanagi-Jones caught it reflexively. A code stick, the sort that worked as a key. He held it up inquiringly, the shackles stopping his hand before it came level with his face.

“Go ahead,” Robert said. He crouched, and began digging in the capacious pockets of his vest. Objects piled on the packed dirt before him. Kusanagi-Jones recognized emergency gear, a primitive datacart of the sort that seemed ubiquitous on New Amazonia, a two-foot knife that Robert pulled from under his vest, a pocket lighter, and the crinkly packaging of a sterile med-kit.

He didn’t stand and gawk. He skipped the code stick over the manacles and pried them open with a sigh, careful not to let the chains clang against the pole when he lowered them. He dropped the code stick on the floor and kicked dirt over it, and stepped toward Robert.

“You’re helping me escape.”

“We’re going together,” Robert said. “The team that went after Lesa came back.”

“Without her?” Kusanagi-Jones sank onto his haunches and began picking items out of the pile and slipping them inside his gi, where the belt would hold them in place. Robert had also provided socks and a pair of low boots, which Kusanagi-Jones jammed his feet into.

“Stefan and Mikhail said they found no sign of her.”

Kusanagi-Jones was not Vincent, but even he could read the irony in that tone. He hefted the knife—he would call it a machete—and shoved it through his belt like a pirate’s scimitar. The hilt poked him under the ribs.

“There was a third with them. Medeline Angkor-Wat. The tracker. Who told me the truth, after Stefan and Mikhail went to get coffee.”

Kusanagi-Jones waited.

Robert lifted his head, fixed Kusanagi-Jones with a look that froze his throat, and filled the silence, the way people did. “We might have a chance to get to her while she’s still alive,” he said, and shoved a water bottle into Kusanagi-Jones’s hand. “There’s a GPS locator and a map in the datacart. If we get separated. Medeline’s best-guess location for where they left Lesa is plotted. It won’t be off by more than a few hundred meters. She’s good.”

Unless she’s lying to you. Kusanagi-Jones pressed his elbow against the pad inside his gi, without voicing the comment. “What about the guard?”

“I brought Chun breakfast,” Robert said. “He should be unconscious by now. And the guards at the gate won’t know you. Here.” He produced a wadded-up dark green shirt from somewhere, and tossed it at Kusanagi-Jones’s chest.

Kusanagi-Jones shrugged it on over his gi. It looked less out of place, and the bottoms were dirty enough to pass for the same sort of baggy tan trousers that Robert was wearing.

Robert stood and rattled the door. “Chun?”

There was no answer. Kusanagi-Jones breathed out a sigh he knew better than to have been holding, and waited while Robert pulled the chain through the hole in the door and used another code stick to unfasten the lock.